Omega Point

by Guy Haley

  Sakaday was younger than Otto, his biologicals fitter and his bionic components more modern, not yet at war with his birth body. Electoos glinted like golden serpents on his rich brown skin. He was not as heavily specced, but he was fast. He caught Otto's elbow as they fell and pushed it up and away. Simultaneously he jerked his arm, still in the vice of Otto's fist. Otto was forced backwards, releasing Sakaday's wrist. Sakaday was staggered by the momentum of Otto's leap. Otto crashed into a clamped airbike, wrecking it. Both recovered quickly.

  Sakaday looked at the wreckage. The train wavered from side to side violently. The AI driver had capacity to govern its smart bogies, constant adjustments compensating for the ancient track. With the train into the DMZ, the AI was off and they were running dumb. Sakaday drew a knife as Otto pulled himself to his feet.

  Otto shook his head and spat a rope of bloody saliva from his mouth. He smiled.

  "What are you doing? What are you doing?" shouted Sakaday. He slapped his chest and held his arms wide. "You are a crazy man." His accent was richly African. "Heh? Heh? Klein, surrender now. Kaplinski wants you alive. Stop!"

  Good, thought Otto, he didn't think he was going to have to fight me. "So I can work with a rapist and killer like you, Sakaday? I don't think so," said Otto. A second green light pinged in his mind, rapidly followed by a third. He ran again at Sakaday.

  They grappled like animals. Their enhancements included many safeguards against standard mêlée techniques. Many moves that would put a normal man out of a fight by destroying joints or snapping limbs did not work on Ky-tech. When fighting one another, they were trained to utilise a brutal blend of martial arts, based primarily on military combat disciplines like Defendu and Krav Maga, but incorporating martial arts like Aikido, primarily those that involved the redirection of mass and energy, forever trying to put one another off balance.

  That was the idea behind their training, but mostly they just punched the shit out of each other using their massively enhanced strength.

  Otto pinned Sakaday's arms by his side, preventing him from bringing his monomolecular knife to bear, and headbutted him three times in the face. Sakaday twisted back and forth, trying to avoid Otto's bludgeoning skull. He caught two blows on his cheeks and the third cracked his nose.

  A fourth green light. Otto's adjutant was working faster, bandwidth freed up by the deactivation of train AI, allowing it to search the Grid rapidly for Chance Key matches. Lucky for him the USNA and the EU wouldn't sell high-end quantum cyphering to the Russians.

  Sakaday snapped his teeth towards Otto, drew himself down and in, then flung his arms out. Unable to break Otto's hold, he got enough room to hook his feet behind Otto's calves and send them both tumbling to the floor. Otto's hold jarred loose, allowing Sakaday to roll free. Lying on his back, Otto chopped down with his forearm, aiming for the African's throat. Sakaday evaded, Otto's arm leaving a long dent in the metal. Otto followed the momentum of his strike, rolling himself over, flipping his legs out and round, tangling Sakaday's knife hand and kicking the weapon free. Otto's legs spun. He pushed with his arms and landed on his feet.

  Sakaday scowled at him, blood trickling from his nose. "You are fighting well for an old man."

  They circled one another round the autoturret, the train swaying under them.

  "You fight like a girl, Sakaday. I suppose that is all you have fought against, women, you and your unit, murdering and raping civilians."

  Sakaday shrugged. Otto cursed inwardly. Things would be better if he were fighting Kaplinski, or some shit like Tufa. He needed a talker. Kaplinski he could goad, he was a self-justifier. Kaplinski would rant on until Christmas. Sakaday never said much. He just killed and laughed while he did it.

  It was so much easier with talkers.

  A fifth green light. Then a sixth.

  Come on! He thought, urging his adjutant on. The mentaug's information flow stuttered with effort, but the remaining six lights remained stubbornly red.

  He was going to have to fight some more.

  Verdammt, his shoulder hurt. He rotated it, snarled at the pain, and charged back into the fray.

  Chures dropped another man in grey. There were a lot of them, so many that their clothes must have had camo-functions, only morphing into their anonymous uniform as the conflict began. It was obvious tech, if you were looking for it. Anywhere else such adaptive garb would have been cause for high suspicion, but this was Russia, where questions of that kind were answered by bullets, or silenced with cash.

  The men were coming fast, too eagerly, and Chures wondered what the hell Kaplinski had promised them to get them to attack so recklessly.

  "These idiots are behaving like zealots, not mercenaries," he said under his breath. His uplinks gave him no clue as to their identity, the same masking techniques as effective here as they had been when they'd taken him on in Colorado and when they'd killed Qifang 2 back in Morden.

  Gunfire blazed the length of the train. Many of the passengers were armed, and the few Cossacks remaining at liberty had identified the men in grey as the threat. For the time being, he and Valdaire would look just like another gung-ho pair engaging hostile elements on the train; it had happened before.

  "How long until the Cossacks work out the complexity of the situation?" he shouted back to Valdaire. She shrugged; there was no way of knowing, now that Chloe was off. She covered the corridor behind them. Chures refrained then from asking her how many men in grey there were.

  "There's a firefight still going on in the carriage two down from ours. Cossacks, I think. Nothing coming our way."

  Chures breathed out, forcing the tension from his muscles. He changed the magazine in his gun; there were only two bullets left in his current clip. "The only thing we can do is go forward."

  A man with muscles like melons took advantage of the lull in fighting, bursting out of his compartment. He toted an automatic pistol like an action hero, a meathead's weapon, a 500-roundsa-minute job whose gilded magazine would last approximately half a second before running dry. Chures held up his hand placatingly. The Slav's face was red and throbbing, his eyes carrying the jaundice associated with bad genehacks and synthetic testosterone burn. He looked angry.

  "Easy! Easy!" called Chures, hoping the man spoke enough English to understand. He glared. Chures pointed to the corpse of the man in grey and wagged a finger, shaking his head. The Russian nodded, and turned to walk up the corridor. He was so full of mood modifiers he'd probably kick a bear in the balls without thinking about the consequences.

  "We've got to get to Klein. If the men in grey don't get us, the Cossacks or one of these crazy bastards will," said Chures.

  The door at the end of the carriage burst open and a huge shape pulled itself through, grunting as it squeezed into the confined space.

  The Russian yelled something. A fist the size of a head grabbed him by the shoulder and squeezed. Chures heard the bone crack from where he was. The Russian screamed as he was plucked off the floor. His weapon discharged its entire load in a cacophony of sparks, bullets bouncing wildly off the train's toughened interior, gunsmoke filling the corridor. The fist slammed him up, mashing his skull into the ceiling. Another hand grabbed the limp form about the neck and pulled. The ruined head came free with a gristly pop. Still holding the corpse, the monster smashed the train's bulletproof window with a lazy backhand. The dead Russian went through it.

  Kaplinski filled the corridor. He had grown monstrous, hulking body barely fitting into the passageway, his head comically small on shoulders that heaved with unnatural power. He was naked, and his muscles bulged and throbbed, distended by some process far removed from Ky-technischeren technology. His eyes blazed feral and saliva ran from his mouth.

  "Klein! I have them now! Little pigs, little pigs," Kaplinski said, lips twisted into a snarl of joyful savagery. "Let me in."

  Then his grin faded, and his head whipped round. "Sakaday…" he growled.

  Chures steadied his gun arm, grasping his rig
ht wrist with his left hand, took careful aim at Kaplinski's head, and fired, and fired, and fired.

  The tenth dot of the Chance Key turned green.

  Otto dodged a flathanded punch that smashed a hole into the autoturret's pillar. He pivoted under Sakaday's next, delivering a forearm slam to the other Ky-tech's head. Sakaday staggered. Otto followed it up fluidly, punching and punching, standard boxing technique now, a sport he had once been a master of.

  Sakaday was driven back. A stagger turned into a dodge and Otto felt his legs swept away from under him. Sakaday kept back, hand reaching down to where his knife rocked on the train flatbed. Otto was up in a crouch as the Nigerian came for him. The monomolecular blade parted the air like a kiss millimetres from his face. He palmed away a strike from Sakaday's other fist and used the momentum of the Nigerian to send him stumbling onward. Otto followed to press his attack, but Sakaday recovered, hopping onto the Stelsco's cradle and turning the movement into a roundhouse kick that caught Otto in the face.

  Eleven green dots in his head, to go with the innumerable coloured blobs dancing across his field of vision, courtesy of Sakaday's foot.

  Sakaday came toward Otto slowly, cautiously. Old or not, Otto was holding his own. Sakaday was limping, his left hand straying to his ribs. Good, thought Otto, I hurt the bastard. Otto considered getting up, but did not.

  Christ, I'm tired, he thought, and urged his healthtech to damp down the fire in his malformed shoulder. Sakaday was younger and fitter than him. Fuck knew which twisted psycho in that tinpot dictatorship had had him altered. They were the only ones who used full mods now. Tech they'd used was good, no Sinosiberian shit here. This was only going to end one way, he thought.

  The Nigerian realised Otto was not going to stand and paused. He stood taller. Healthtech flares lit up in Otto's iHUD overlay, mending his opponent as they talked. "You are old, you should have given up."

  Otto grinned a bloody smile. "You are not the first person to say that to me."

  Sakaday stretched out. Otto watched the shift in Sakaday's EM aura as his healthtech nanobots worked hard. If only Otto's own healthtech were so swift.

  Sakaday grinned, startling white teeth revealed by lips already losing their swelling. He tossed his knife from hand to hand and crouched. "But I will be the last."

  Behind Sakaday the Stelsco lit up, flexing on gimballed wheel units as it awoke, the grumble and whine of hardware coming online hidden by the train's clatter. Command permissions flooded Otto's mentaug, handing control to his adjutant, running fast even on old hardware, the beauty of modern aware 'ware, adapting itself to what it found. Otto fused his mind to the machine's. He ran the turret on its roof rail to the front of the Stelsco and tracked it down.

  "No, you won't." Otto selected the upper third of Sakaday's body as a target through the turret eye cams, the reticule system rendered in flat orange in his iHUD.

  Remote fire online, confirm target? said the Stelsco's mind in a rush of machine speak.

  Sakaday! Kaplinski's warning was a ludicrous drone over the MT.

  Confirm, commanded Otto. Otto lifted his hand to protect his eyes as the Stelsco's turret opened fire.

  Sakaday was laughing as twin heavy machine guns shredded his right arm, shoulder, head and neck into mince. Bits of him splattered the flatbed like thrown paint. The rest of him was untouched, Otto having targeted those areas that would prevent him from being hit by stray rounds. Sakaday's skull held for a moment before shattering under the pounding bullets. His augmented bones twisted to plastic scrap, leaving a gory mannequin tottering on top of a pair of undamaged legs. For a moment the corpse swayed, impossibly upright.

  Sakaday's long knife fell to the floor and stuck quivering in the metal.

  His body toppled from the flatbed, snatched away by the rushing landscape.

  Kaplinski roared in anger as Chures' bullets slammed into his face. For a second, Chures thought he might have done the cyborg damage, but his head came round and fixed him with a bloody stare. The righthand side of his face was shredded down to black bone, one eye pulped to jelly and fibrous machine parts. His gun ran dry, and he shot out the smoking magazine, reaching smoothly for a fresh one and slamming it home.

  "That the best you got, you fucking little dago?" said Kaplinski.

  "Madre de Dios," said Chures, and there was grim acceptance in there. This was not a man he could beat. This was not a man.

  Kaplinski's ragged flesh writhed, strips of flesh reached over to one another and pulled tight. Wounds sealed themselves like lips. The cyborg shut his eyes, his distended body pulsed, and he gasped with something akin to pleasure. When he opened his eyes again, both were whole.

  Kaplinski forced himself down the corridor, wiping ocular humours and blood from his face. He dragged his swollen bulk through the passage, grasping at doorways, tearing metal and shattering glass to pull himself forward.

  "I told Klein that I had been cured by k52," roared the cyborg as he came on.

  Chures put bullets into the cyborg until his gun clicked empty again.

  "I didn't tell him what else he has done for me." Kaplinski loomed over the VIA agent. Chures had read the cyborg's file; he was supposed to be around 1.9m, but he was at least half a metre over that. Impossible.

  "Valdaire," he said, his voice quiet. The train and its racket receded. He remembered another rhythmic noise: hard rain on tattered tents and shelters of sun-bleached plastic. Puerto Penasco. He remembered the man and his sister. He fought only for her to die. No matter what he did, the strong would always destroy the weak. He could only put himself in the way for a while.

  He prayed that he had done enough.

  "Run," he said.

  Valdaire turned to flee as Kaplinski slammed Chures in the chest with the flat of his palm. The Colombian flew backwards, limbs tangling on her heels, bringing her down. She struggled round. Chures' breath was shallow. Blood leaked from his nostrils. She'd lost her gun, but it would have been no use against the altered Ky-tech. Kaplinski stood over her, malformed and diabolical, features twisted in a mask of pleasure and fury.

  "Klein killed one of mine, now I take two of his. Only fair."

  Chloe, she still had Chloe. Her hand hidden under Chures' unconscious body, she surreptitiously keyed her on.

  A giant hand descended toward her, encircled her chest and plucked her from the floor. He held her up before his face, nostrils flaring like those of a mad horse.

  "How do you want to die, Fräulein?"

  "Veronique? Veev? Are we there yet? Why have you activated me? Veev!"

  Kaplinski's eyes locked with Valdaire's. He sneered. "Oh, Fräulein, what can that little thing do to me?"

  The door to the rear of the carriage opened. Two Cossacks shouldered their way through. They shouted, opening fire. Another came forward, a bulky tube on his back. It launched a small guided missile. It embedded itself in Kaplinski's flesh. A huge discharge of energy arced through it, following the trail of ionised air from gun to projectile. Valdaire nearly blacked out, her teeth jamming together as her muscles locked. Kaplinski seemed unaffected, and swiped the missile from his side.

  "I don't have time for this," growled the ex-Ky-tech. He squeezed Valdaire in his fist as bullets thwacked into his skin. They were pushed out by his runaway healthtech, the wounds they caused sealing instantly.

  "Chloe!" screamed Valdaire. There was barely enough air in her crushed chest to get the words out. She couldn't breathe. For the first time in a long time she found herself praying again that the energy surge from the Cossack's maxi-taser had not destroyed her friend. She remembered the last occasion, in the church of St Germaine in Sakassou, her kneeling before damp plaster effigies. Was her life already flashing before her? For a moment she sat there in the past, in the damp coolness of the church, hoping it would be alright and that the shouting and screams outside wouldn't find their way into the church, and then a rib creaked and she was back in the present, confronted with another horror. Blackness li
mned the edge of her awareness. "Kitty Claw! Kitty Claw!" she gasped.

  Valdaire had no idea if the programme, one she'd designed to shut off intrusive AIs, would work on the cyborg's built-in software. All of them carried an advanced near-I adjutant, a military version of a helper valet. Without the adjutant, the efficiency of their systems was severely compromised. She hoped to God that Kitty Claw would engage it and shut it down.

  It did better than she'd hoped. Kaplinski locked rigid. She gasped and wriggled, trying to prise herself free of Kaplinski's grip.

  The Cossacks came forward and tugged at the cyborg's fingers, eventually managing to free Valdaire. She fell to the floor, gasping. The Cossacks levelled their guns at her.

  She waved them away. "My friend," she said, pulling Chures into her arms, "please, help him."